Laos: America interferes again

~ Kelly Dunagan ~ 3 Comments

After a slow couple of years, reading-wise, I finally finished my Burma reading list in January (only three years and change after I commenced), and then, feeling newly motivated, I motored through Laos in two months. Someday soon I hope to go back and write about all the books I read from Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Burma—but just in case I don’t get to it, I highly recommend Malaysian novels The Rice Mother, Evening Is the Whole Day, The Ghost Bride, and The Terracotta Bride, Singaporean literary fiction Ponti and the Crown Colony mysteries of Ovidia Yu (also, Crazy Rich Asians doesn’t really need my plug, but I read the whole series and enjoyed every minute of it), the absolutely brilliant Bangkok Wakes to Rain from Thailand (plus short story collections Bright and Sightseeing and the classic novel Monsoon Country), and from Burma, the charming travelogues of Ma Thanegi, as well as the memoir From the Land of Green Ghosts—but for now, I want to make some quick notes about my Laotian reads while my memory is still fresh.

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Quick takes from the Philippines

~ Kelly Dunagan ~ Leave a comment

So, 2020, huh?

I thought about writing a little cap to the year–something about being stuck at home with two small children during an international pandemic, and the wildfires here in California, and unchecked white supremacists driving the country to the brink of civil war but…you get it. You’re all there, more or less (except you lucky bastards who live in New Zealand and are going to have to deal with a sudden influx of immigrants once we’re finally allowed to go anywhere), so I don’t have to tell you what it’s like. Suffice it to say, my brain is pretty fried after the past ten months, and while I’m still reading, not much of it is medieval epic poetry from Southeast Asia. I’ve been working my way through the Khun Chang Khun Phaen, a seminal work of Thai literature, since last February. I managed to get through the novels on my Thai reading list and have tentatively moved on to Myanmar/Burma, but mostly I’ve been reading the collected works of N.K. Jemisin and Octavia Butler, with occasional forays into YA dystopian fantasy. I don’t have the wherewithal to write long screeds about individual books that I read in 2018, and I suspect few people would have the attention span to read them right now anyway. So here are my thoughts on a whole bunch of books from the Philippines, in short format. Maybe I’ll come back to one or two of these later, but for now I just want to get them down and move on. Let’s do this.

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What I’m Reading: coronavirus edition

~ Kelly Dunagan ~ Leave a comment

You would think that being forced to stay home all the time would mean more time for reading, writing, and blog posting but I haven’t found it to be the case. I mean, maybe if you added up all the time I’ve spent reading headlines and statistics over the past two weeks it would end up being equivalent to Ivanhoe, but finding the time and focus to read any of the four Thai novels I started last month has proved difficult.

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Reading update

~ Kelly Dunagan ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t posted a reading update in a while because I haven’t been reading that much. I’ve mostly been very slowly plugging away at Four Reigns this week (ok, that’s not entirely true. I’ve MOSTLY been grudge-reading P.D. James novels on my kindle in the middle of the night while waiting for my baby to fall back asleep, but that is beyond the scope of this particular reading project). It’s pleasant reading but not exactly a page-turner; mostly a nostalgic depiction of a bygone era.

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